The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the inventors hereof, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted to be prior art against the present disclosure.
A system on chip (SOC) is an integrated circuit that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip. For example, the SOC includes digital, analog, mixed-signal, and radio frequency functions on the same single chip. The SOC usually integrates different Internet Protocol (IP) components with different data types, and each IP component normally has its own register module that is used to configure and to monitor the IP component itself. In this case, when the SOC hosts a large number of IP components and each IP components requires a separate register module, the SOC may not have enough physical space to place all the components and their respective register modules via a conventional bus, because the number of devices connected to the conventional bus is limited. Thus, the size challenge may limit the number of components the SOC can host and thus the functional capacity of the SOC is restricted. In addition, timing closure at the backend may be difficult to achieve because the path between the bus and IP components on the SOC could be long. When the large number of IP components are connected to a serial bus, a significant latency may be experienced, which impairs the performance of the SOC.